Sea swimming, Cornwall
Philip Marsden, writer
The important thing on New Year’s Day – as on most days over Christmas – is to get out. If you don’t manage it by about midday, suddenly it’s dusk and too late.
Living in Cornwall makes you a sitting target for visitors, and we normally have an assortment of friends and family packed into our house. There’s a favourite cove a few miles away, behind Nare Head. It’s hard to see from the track above, and the squelchy route down and the cliff-scramble mean that, even in summer, there’s rarely anyone else there. The bay is a great gatherer of driftwood (as well as less-flammable flotsam – random shoes, gloves, bath toys, broken fish boxes and cobles…). We build a fire and drink hot soup and cook sausages. If there’s a swell running, and the tides are low, some of us will tug on wetsuits and boots and try the surf – others might dash in for a new year’s baptismal dip.
To one side of the beach, the cliff has been cut into, forming gullies – or “zawns”, from the Cornish. You can swim into these and feel the sea surge in and rise and fall against the rocks while you bob, cork-like, upon them, contemplating the ups and downs of the coming year.
• Philip Marsden’s most recent book is The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination
A walk in the woods, Dartmoor
Miriam Darlington, writer
The flanks of Dartmoor are always whitened with frost and hidden icicles on new year’s morning. This is where I set out to, with snow boots, flasks of hot tea and my loved ones.
Often, we make our way up to Wistman’s Wood. This grizzled place is one of the few original ancient oak woods left on the moor, and it feels enchanted. From a distance, its furze of stunted oaks set among the clutter of granite boulders looks unremarkable, but inside is a muscular wood-world of moss boulders and ankle-turning tangles of trunks, roots and loopy beards of lichen.
Here, we sit in the stillness between weather patterns and think about our resolutions – what the old year has been and what we wish for the new. Among the trees, we listen to the high, glassy crepitation of twigs conversing from their coatings of ice, poised for the next incoming skitter of cold.
There is something safe about a wood in winter: its spacious leaflessness allows you to see your way out, and in the “dimpsey” light we drink steaming tea and watch shadows move around us. Wistman’s Wood is a sheltering place – very slightly uncanny, and good for invoking wishes – but not one in which to linger too long.
• Miriam Darlington is author of Otter Country
Plant hunting, Suffolk
Melissa Harrison, nature writer and novelist
For the decade between my mid-twenties and mid-thirties, I missed every single New Year’s Day.
Often I was out dancing and doing shots and chatting nonsense with friends and strangers: in a dark, windowless club, perhaps, or at a raucous house party with all the blinds drawn. Sometimes I spent it spark out under a duvet, recovering from the night before. Either way, the day just didn’t exist for me: events like the Oxford Street sales, or London’s New Year’s Day Parade, were purely mythical. I never even saw the sun.
Another decade on and things are different. Since moving to Suffolk, I’ve made a point of going for a proper walk on 1 January so I can think, and feel, and breathe, and see the new year in.
More than once on my rambles I’ve come across people botanising, which may seem unlikely given the time of year. But it turns out the New Year Plant Hunt, now nine years old, is fast becoming A Thing: volunteers across the country head out and record whatever’s flowering at nyph.bsbi.org, the results analysed by the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland to shed light on our changing weather.
It seems to me a powerful ritual, as well as providing useful data: like the clubs I’ve left behind, it’s a quest for life and promise and colour at the chill, drab turning of the year.
• Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019
Triathlon, Edinburgh
John Whittaker, Silent Running Scotland
On 1 January at Holyrood Park in Edinburgh you might expect to see families taking a refreshing stroll, or folks walking off hangovers from their big night. But you will be surprised: hundreds of Lycra-clad triathletes will be thundering through the park, cycling and running. Yes it is likely to be cold, wet and windy, possibly even snowy, but for 25 years the park has hosted a sprint-distance triathlon – there have been Olympic- and world-level athletes out on course alongside many hundreds of first-time triathletes. Each year, around half the field are first-timers, and in the past few years the number of women competing has overtaken the men.
The swim is over 400 metres indoors at the Royal Commonwealth Pool (breaking ice on the local lochs is just a step too far). Then the hardy souls take to their bikes for a three-lap, 10-mile route around Arthur’s Seat, with a substantial hill to be climbed on each lap. Lastly, it’s one more run around the park, before heading for the finish line to be rewarded with a medal and to bask in the glory of becoming a New Year’s Day triathlete.
• edinburghtri.org
Birding, Bristol
Tim Dee, nature writer
Birders often keep year-lists and I have spent the scant daylight of many new year’s days kickstarting my annual tally. Some occasions have given me 60 or more species and have been scintillating – the bright sparks of jack snipe flushed at Whiteford Burrows in South Wales; a great grey shrike like an altar candle on the Isle of Sheppey; the grey powder-puff drift of six male hen harriers coming to roost at Wicken Fen.
But many first days are cold and dreary, as haggard and hungover as I often am, and my list then has stalled at a few blue and great tits coming to some stale Christmas pudding on my bird table in Bristol. It pays not to set too much store – no augury – by the numbers you achieve by dusk… the year can still be won. Nowadays, I twitch less, and go to the Clifton Downs instead for any signs of spring that are already abroad. Snowdrops help to hurry up the year, there are aconites often in these days of milder winters, and if you can hear a mistle thrush belting out its steely-cold spring song from the chilled top of a bare tree on the cliffs of the Avon Gorge, the good life feels within the grasp of all once more.
• Tim Dee’s new book Greenery: Journeys in Springtime is out in March (Jonathan Cape)
Midnight vigil, Inner Hebrides
Jim Crumley, nature writer
Midnight: a beach and a driftwood fire, South Skye or west coast Mull. Starlight, moonlight, then the aurora. Then listen. To the night, to the sea, to the voices of the winter dark.
Grey seals singing as the tide ebbs and frees the haul-out rocks. Owl-to-owl call, kee-wick to whoo-oo. Then try and count the owls. Fox, triple bark (the dog), mating season scream (the vixen, hair-raising). Whooper swan restlessness scored for muted brass on a hidden lochan just above the beach. And listen to the fire talking to itself through the wee hours, and to each other.
The tenor of New Year’s Day is established between the hours of midnight and sunrise.
Then, stir the fire, make porridge, and through the daylight hours walk the island until you find an unplanned destination (you know it when you get there).
Then, a cottage with the sea across the street. Bath with good whisky. Dinner with good wine. Toast: Bliadhna mhath ur dhuinn – A good New Year to Us. Who with? Oh, she knows, she knows.
• Jim Crumley’s latest book is The Nature of Spring
A walk in the Downs, Kent
Maryanne Grant Traylen, writer
Because I am a ritual sun ray-gatherer – particularly at this winter solstice time of year, when the sun’s early descent is so fiery and intense – my lone spirit plus dog will long for the hills on New Year’s Day. My children and I raise our heads above the parapet of festive fugs. The coast will be clear. We’ll turn away from the glistening sea to head inland to elevations west of the Folkestone Downs near Peene Quarry or Etchinghill.
For a while we’ll walk and talk. Then, from across the flow and glow of golden-flanked Down, we’ll be dazzled by an ever-changing veil of rose-tinted ambers and yellows that sweep across our vision, till the orb, departed behind Summerhouse and Tolsford Hills, turns the once-gilded grasses white and colourless in the not-yet-dark.
Raising our gaze to whisks of peach-pink ribboning in the sky, we’ll cherish the belief that all must be conceived of, if not done, on New Year’s Day, if it is to happen at all. And up here you can give it your best, letting words tumble, wishing for well-being everywhere. As we look down again we’ll contemplate the sprouting sappiness of earth to be, and a pint of beer alongside a welcome at the Radnor Arms in Folkestone!
• Maryanne Grant Traylen is author of A Dog on the Downs
Pirates and foragers, Dorset
Jade and Dan Scott, adventure guides
New Year’s Day for us isn’t about making up guilt-ridden resolutions as punishment for indulging in too many mince pies; it’s an opportunity to pause and look back at the year behind, to celebrate all the little wins in life and all the happy moments that we made happen for us and others – to remind ourselves of what makes us who we are and what we need to keep doing in the future to keep happy.
We like to be with our favourite people, doing simple things, sharing time in nature, no big gestures. We gather up family and friends and head down the South West Coast Path to one of our special places, Pondfield Cove, at Worbarrow Bay beneath the watchful eye of Worbarrow Tout. This is the smaller and lesser-known beach of the two that our children like to think is their own secret cove, and we like to let them think that..
We light fires and play pirates, search for sea glass and driftwood, seaweed and wild herbs. We cook a warming stew over the flames and eat it out of tin mugs. The kids get filthy and run free and there’s always one mad person in the party who can’t stay out of the sea!
• Jade and Dan Scott run sea kayaking and bushcraft courses in Dorset, foreadventure.co.uk
Winter dips, Ireland and Dover
Nicolas Deshayes, artist
For the past few years I’ve spent New Year’s Day on the south coast of Ireland. Egged on by my adventurous cousins, this is where I first got a taste for winter swimming. The first day of the year always involves a swim off Goat Island, in County Waterford, as sausages cook in the sand.
Last August I decided to make Dover my home. I moved into a Regency crescent by the castle and from here I can see the waves crash into the harbour below. To beat creeping feelings of isolation I started tentatively dipping myself into the sea; but as autumn has turned to winter these outings have become a necessary daily fix, where no day feels complete without a half-hour swim in the Channel.
I now structure my work hours around tide timetables and, come rain or shine, I clip on my fluorescent tow float, pull on my neoprene gloves, and roll into the waves. Often going in naked – to titillate the looming border patrol – I dodge the ferries and aim for France. Every day feels like New Year’s Day.
Flights of fancy, West Country
Kate Rew, founder of The Outdoor Swimming Society
I like a good time but New Year’s Eve has always been too much pressure for my wayward ways. I prefer New Year’s Day. I like starting the year relatively fresh, and ending the day in a clean bed, beaten and battered by exertion and weather. At some point I generate inconceivably long lists that boil down to “get fit, drink less, write something and do yoga”.
Maximum time outside is different every year. Three years ago my husband and I double-dipped, first in fancy dress at the Lyme Lunge in Lyme Regis, Dorset, then under a supermoon. Two years ago we walked up and down Sugarloaf mountain in Monmouthshire. Last year we cycled what felt like the whole of Somerset.
A swimmer I know puts her resolutions in a frame in the downstairs loo, so she (and everyone else) can see them. This year I’m doing the same, which is already making me reframe them in other ways. The same four core points will undoubtedly be the same, but I’m 50 now and this year – this year! – those dreams are coming true.
• To find a New Year’s swim, see outdoorswimmingsociety.com
Seeds of hope, Gog Magog Hills, Cambridge
Olivia Laing, author
New Year’s Eve is my worst night of the year. I always feel like I’m in the wrong place, or not having enough fun. By contrast, New Year’s Day is my favourite. I love the quiet, the sense that the world has temporarily fallen still. I’ve developed a tradition of using it to plan next year’s planting in my garden.
First I walk at Wandlebury Park in the Gog Magog Hills in Cambridge, through the neglected orchards of a former stately home, and then I settle down with tea and the last of the sausage rolls, and sort through seed catalogues, sketching out border designs in my battered garden diary. My favourite is the austere Chiltern Seeds, which has no pictures, only wonderfully vivid and knowledgeable mini-essays.
I love old-fashioned cottage garden plants: opium poppies, sweet peas like Black Knight and King Edward VII, candy-striped cosmos and tagetes. But like the Talented Mr Ripley, my true passion is for dahlias, especially the ones that look like sea anemones. It’s the best kind of dreaming to do at the hinge of the year, an investment in summer that always comes good, no matter what else 2020 might bring.
• Olivia Laing’s collected essays, Funny Weather, is published by Picador in April
Skirting the border
Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, writers and musicians
On New Year’s Eve we usually make a list of aspirations for the coming year, as well as reflecting on those of the year just gone. We often try to spend at least part of New Year’s Day trying to put those objectives into practice: beginning a new piece of writing, art or music. We also try to get outdoors, and for the past two winters we’ve been in the Scottish Borders, living close to Liddel Water — the river that further downstream forms the boundary between Scotland and England. There’s a path along its edge that we like to walk, skirting a threshold as we cross over into a new year.
• corbelstonepress.com
London soundtrack
Raymond Antrobus, poet
I feel fresher if I’ve written down all the unhelpful and hurtful things that my mind has accumulated over the year (harsh and unkind things said to my face, online or behind my back, including things I’ve said about myself), then gone to a river, a forest or garden – in London this will be Regent’s Park or Victoria Park – and burned them like a pile of paper grudges. This ritual helps me move forward, otherwise I become a wheel that has accumulated too much from old roads and I’ll never let them go. I go for long walks alone and listen to music with no lyrics: jazz, dance, funk, electronic, dub. Then I roll into the new year with friends and family and food – ackee and salt fish, and if dessert is going, it’s apple crumble and custard.
• raymondantrobus.com
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